This paper describes the design of a longitudinal speech study and the general hypotheses associated with the study. Simply put, the general hypotheses are that some variation over time in how people speak is caused by their interactions with other people, that the nature of this variation is related to the social attitudes people have toward each other, and that social dynamics are the main source of instability in speech patterns. While these hypotheses may seem straightforward, and perhaps obviously true, testing them rigorously is complicated. I should confess that in testing these hypotheses I have a parallel agenda, which is to promote a research paradigm in which we attend more carefully to the physical grounding of our analytical categories. Because the hypotheses refer to variation over time, I start by considering possible patterns and causes of temporal variation.

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